Consortium will build cloud-based data resources, tools, and interoperable standards, giving researchers simultaneous access to biomedical datasets from across the National Institutes of Health

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., November 06, 2017 – Seven Bridges, the leading biomedical data analysis company, today announced that it has been selected by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase. As a corporate service provider, Seven Bridges will build upon its expertise delivering the NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud to advance NIH’s vision for a virtual biomedical data discovery and computing environment employing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data sharing principles. The Data Commons Pilot Phase is NIH’s latest effort to accelerate biomedical research through informatics.

Seven Bridges will lead a team consisting of Repositive Ltd., a UK-based software company developing tools to improve access to genomic research data; Elsevier, the informatics analytics business specializing in science and health; and the Boston Veterans Affair Research Institute, which has created the Million Veteran Program, the largest genomic database in the world. Together, they are forming a private-public consortium called FAIR4CURES.

“The NIH Data Commons promises to transform the way public biomedical data is stored and analyzed,” said Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D., CEO, Seven Bridges. “An effort of this scale has never been tried before and its focus on interoperable data accessibility answers the call to break open data siloes, setting new standards for healthcare research.”

The FAIR4CURES team will work within the overall Data Commons pilot to build a full-stack solution that unifies data from a variety of research environments into a single ecosystem that advances data discovery, access, and computation. Seven Bridges will lead the overall project using its existing cloud infrastructure for biomedical data analysis, which includes AWS, Google, and local compute storage solutions, and continue building interoperability standards, such as Common Workflow Language, to accelerate collaborative research and open source development.

The company will also create interoperable APIs to connect biomedical data from the Cancer Genomics Cloud and Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Center to additional NIH datasets such as the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed), Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx), and the Model Organism Databases (MODs) datasets. Other members of the FAIR4CURES consortium will contribute access to petabytes of additional data, including more than one million indexed datasets from the Repositive Platform, Elsevier’s Mendeley data hub, and the VA’s GenHub Ecosystem.

The FAIR4CURES consortium is funded under NIH grant No. 1 OT3 OD025463-01. Additional grants under the NIH Data Commons have been awarded to other institutions. For a full list and additional information, please see https://commonfund.nih.gov/bd2k/commons/awardees.

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About Seven Bridges

Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development, and precision medicine. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, pharmaceutical, and academic labs use Seven Bridges, including global pharmaceutical companies and national genomics projects such as the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot, the Gabriella Miller Kids’ First Data Center, the Million Veteran Program, and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project.